According to the results of a survey by broadband services company Sandvine, Netflix is ascendant with a whopping 37% of downstream traffic. Nipping at its heels is YouTube (18%), Amazon Video (3%) and iTunes (2.8%). This has been a massive year for the streaming market, which has more than doubled its percentage of Internet traffic in the last five years.

An intriguing number now lurks at the margins of the Sandvine report. Per the Christian Science Monitor:

While the file-sharing service BitTorrent once occupied 31 percent of the total Internet traffic in 2008, this year it occupied 5 percent of the total Internet traffic during the entire day.

Holy shit. Piracy, we barely knew ye. That’s an incredible drop in BitTorrent usage, demonstrating that people are willing to pay for media services so long as they’re fast, reliable, and host prime content. As our media overlords roll out more plans to access their content without a cable box and companies like YouTube and Amazon make streaming revenue a priority, the field is only going to grow.

It’s hard to foresee a future where Netflix isn’t king, however: they just announced that they’re nearly doubling the amount of original content scripted series next year, from 16 to 31. Will we soon tell war stories of a time of piracy long since past? “In my day, we had to go to great, treacherous lengths to watch our Game of Thrones,” we’ll say, and the kids will look confused: “Was that a Netflix Original?”

Good. Maybe when Comcast, AT&T, Rogers, and all those other idiot ISPs try to pull more bullshit, more of their customers will begin to cry foul. It's asinine how they try to play like they are struggling to meet demand, and try imposing data caps, and then when a real ISP like Google Fiber comes to town, suddenly they open the floodgates to the community. Fuck those asshats and their backroom duopolistic deals.

Einhander

12-09-2015, 11:51 AM

Not me! Fuck the Netflix monopoly and fuck all streaming services that try and choose what I can and can't watch!

FinalSolace2

12-10-2015, 06:43 AM

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ego_depletion

Ego depletion wikipedia. I.E. were Programmed to be cunts by nature

Key experimental evidence Edit

Roy Baumeister and his colleagues proposed a model that relates self-control to a muscle, which can become both strengthened and fatigued. Initial use of the “muscle” of self-control will cause a decrease in strength, or ego depletion, for subsequent tasks. Multiple experimental findings show this muscle model of self-control and ego depletion.[2]

A key experiment by Roy Baumeister, Ellen Bratslavsky, Mark Muraven and Dianne Tice in 1998, demonstrated some of the first evidence that ego depletion has effects in many diverse contexts or situations.[1] They showed that people who initially resisted the temptation of chocolates were subsequently less able to persist on a difficult and frustrating puzzle task. They attributed this effect to ego depletion, which resulted from the prior resisting of a tempting treat. Additionally, it was demonstrated that when people voluntarily gave a speech that included beliefs contrary to their own, they were also less able to persist on the difficult puzzle, indicating a state of ego depletion. Interestingly, this effect was not nearly as strong when individuals were not given a choice and were "forced" to write a counter-attitudinal speech. Thus, it is believed that both the act of choice and counter-attitudinal behaviors draw upon the same pool of limited resources. While giving a counter-attitudinal speech is expected to produce ego depletion, introducing the element of choice further increases the level of experienced depletion. These findings demonstrated the effects of ego depletion in differential situations and emphasized that ego depletion is not context-specific. This experiment was critical in that the researchers synthesized ideas proposed by prior studies that had suggested evidence for a strength model of willpower. With this study, Baumeister and his colleagues therefore provided the first direct experimental evidence of ego depletion, and initiated research interest on the subject.u

Physiological correlates Edit

The role of glucose as a specific form of energy needed for self-control has been explored. Glucose, a sugar found in many foods, is a vital fuel for the body and the brain. Multiple experiments have connected self-control depletion to reduced blood glucose, and that self-control performance could be replenished by consuming glucose (e.g., lemonade).[3] However, some (but not all) of the findings were questioned.[4] Several recent experiments have found that resource depletion effects can be reversed by simply tasting (but not swallowing or consuming) sweet beverages,[5][6][7] which can have rewarding properties.[8] Others have suggested that the taste of sugar (but not artificial sweetener) has psycho-physiological signaling effects.

An experiment by Segertrom (2007) and Solberg Nes, has shown that HRV (heart rate variability) is a marker for both ego depletion, and an index for self-control power before the task. [1]

The underlying neural processes associated with self-control failure have been recently examined using neurophysiological techniques. According to cognitive and neuroscientific models of mental control, a "conflict-monitoring/error-detection system" identifies discrepancies between intended goals and actual behaviors.[9] Error-related negativity (ERN) signals are a waveform of event-related potentials, which appear to be generated in the anterior cingulate cortex when individuals commit errors in various psychological tasks.[10] Using electroencephalography (EEG) recordings, Inzlicht and Gutsell found that individuals who had undergone an emotion-suppression task displayed weaker ERN signals compared to individuals who had not undergone emotion-suppression tasks.[9] These findings demonstrate preliminary evidence that depletion experienced after exerting self-control, can weaken neural mechanisms responsible for conflict monitoring.